Prompting new poems for Red Wolf Journal

Prompt for RWJ, Prompt 296

I know I’d asked for a writing poem. You know, a poem about writing. (Oh I see poems in a bucket, so this is real.) Often it’s language that’s steering us. It shapes a world view. There’re so many competing world views. And yet we own only our own. And believe it to be the true one. What’s your prevailing world view, that’s what I’m asking now, and relate it to writing if possible. Surely when we see the creatures in the world, and how amazing each is (for instance, think of a kangaroo, whose world view must surely rests on those powerful legs), and how different (contrast it with a snail who has a large and very flat foot), wouldn’t you begin to see how just writing names something for us? But do things exist because we speak of them? Of course not. Ultimately everything in the physical world is outside language, is “silent”. The poetic realm tries to address this “silence” too.

Post navigation

3 thoughts on “Prompt for RWJ, Prompt 296”

I have a quote for you. I’m reading “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson. Letter to the god Enki (pun?)
“…I, a writer who knows many things, am made a fool.
My hand has stopped writing
There is no talk in my mouth…” Then the writer prays that god will ‘take pity and give it back to me.’
How appropriate for where I am right now. But, I persevere (to your chagrin 🙂 haha)

after his murder in the courtyard
his body was sent to the cellar morgue
where men of science dissected his flesh
in search of those seditious words unsaid
that waited for the right poem
in the depths of him from which
they might one day metrically sail free

all they found were not unlike discoveries
made in the battlefield autopsies of heroes
who lie gut-wrenched, organs exposed
to the elements of snow and ice and time
while their filmed eyes like cameras
indelibly capture life’s passing
which the souls of them carry away

he wrote poems in his Spanish tongue
danced them down paper roads like village songs
meant to be sung if only to rally the listless
but those unversed in the art of sweet language
those whose iron hands wield iron guns
can only rattle destructive syllables of fire
can only murder the poet but never the poem

can never hear the language that trilled within him
those sweet birds with so many stories to tell
about sharing the expanse of land and sky